Henry de Montherlant

Biography

Born in Paris, a descendant of an aristocratic (yet obscure) Picard family, Henry Montherlant was educated at the Lycée Janson de Sailly and the Sainte-Croix boarding school at Neuilly-sur-Seine. Henry's father was a hard-line reactionary. He despised the post-Dreyfus Affair army as too subservient to the Republic, and refused to have electricity or the telephone installed in his house. Henry's mother, a formerly lively socialite, became chronically ill due to difficult childbirth. She was bedridden most of the time, and died at the young age of 43.

From the age of seven or eight, Henry was enthusiastic about literature and began writing. In 1905 reading Quo Vadis by Henryk Sienkiewicz gave him a lifelong fascination with Ancient Rome and prompted a proficient interest in Latin. He was enthusiastic about school comradeship, sports and bullfighting. When he was 15, his parents sent him alone on a trip to Spain, where he became initiated in the corrida. He killed two young bulls. He was also a talented draughtsman, often portraying nudes.

On 5 April 1912, aged almost seventeen, Henry was expelled from the Catholic Sainte-Croix de Neuilly. Together with five other youngsters, he had founded a group called 'La Famille' (the Family), a kind of order of chivalry whose members were bonded by an oath of fidelity and mutual assistance. A member of that group was Philippe Jean Giquel (1897–1977), two years younger than Henry. Montherlant was enamored with him but they had no physical contact. According to Montherlant, this "special friendship" had aroused the fierce and jealous opposition of abbé de La Serre, who arranged to have the older youth expelled. This incident (and Giquel) became a lifelong obsession of Montherlant. He drew on the incident for his 1952 play La Ville dont le prince est un enfant and his 1969 novel Les Garçons. Also, in his adult years, he had renewed his platonic friendship with Giquel. By then married, Giguel invited the writer to be the godfather of his daughter Marie-Christine.

After the deaths of his father and mother in 1914 and 1915, Montherlant went to live with his doting grandmother and eccentric uncles. Mobilised in 1916 during World War I, he was wounded and decorated. Marked by his experience of war, he wrote Songe ("Dream"), an autobiographic novel, as well as his Chant funèbre pour les morts de Verdun ("Funeral Song for the Dead at Verdun"), both exaltations of heroism during the Great War. Le Paradis à l’ombre des Epées ("Paradise in the Shadow of Swords") was entered in the literature competition at the 1924 Olympics in Paris but did not win a medal.

Montherlant first achieved critical success with the 1934 novel Les Célibataires. He sold millions of copies of his tetralogy Les Jeunes Filles, written from 1936 through 1939. In these years Montherlant, a well-to-do heir, traveled extensively, mainly to Spain (where he met and worked with bullfighter Juan Belmonte), Italy, and Algeria.

During the Second World War after the fall of France in 1940, he remained in Paris. There he continued to write plays, poems, and essays, and worked as a war correspondent. Since he had been awarded the Grand Prix de Littérature de l'Académie française in 1934, he was considered among France's leading writers. He wrote in admiring tones of the victorious Germans, seeing in them members of a manly, stronger race.

After the war, he escaped the severe punishments meted out in France to other pro-German writers. The Committee for the Purification of Writers prohibited him from publishing anything, but limited the ban to one year. Montherlant's collaborationism was soon forgotten. In 1960, he became a member of the Académie Française.

In 1968, according to Roger Peyrefitte, the 72-year-old Montherlant was attacked and beaten up by a group of youths outside a movie theatre in Paris because he had groped one of them. Montherlant was blinded in one eye as a result. The British writer Peter Quennell, who edited a collection of translations of his works, recalled that Montherlant attributed the eye injury to "a fall" instead; he noted that Montherlant suffered from vertigo.

Montherlant suffered increasing loss of sight and became the target of critics such as Peyrefitte. In 1972 he committed suicide, shooting himself in the head after swallowing a cyanide capsule.

As he had requested, his ashes were scattered by Jean-Claude Barat and Gabriel Matzneff in Rome, at the Forum, among the Temple of Portunus, and into the Tiber.

His biography was written by Pierre Sipriot and published in two volumes (1982 and 1990).